Chicago is taking yet another baby step along the road toward providing some form of reparations for descendants of African-American slaves.
Two years after naming his own chief equity officer and charging Carla Kupe with overseeing the work of a $500,000 reparations task force, Mayor Brandon Johnson is launching a public engagement effort to “gather lived experiences of harm of Black Chicagoans.”
Information about those “systemic harms” — gathered through panel discussions, town hall meetings, public hearings and a public survey — will be used to produce a reparations study that will serve as a “historic step towards acknowledging, addressing, and repairing generations of harm experienced by Black communities,” city officials said.
Johnson campaigned on a promise to provide reparations and is under pressure to deliver on that promise — and find a way to pay for it — with less than a year to go before the mayoral election.
The city has established a May 31 deadline for completing a public survey that can be accessed at Chicago.gov/RepairChicago.
In a press release about the effort, Johnson said his "Repair Chicago" campaign is about “listening to Black Chicagoans across our city, acknowledging the harms of the past and present, and building a path forward rooted in truth, accountability and opportunity.”
“Your experience is evidence and we’ve placed it at the center of our work,” Johnson said. “By engaging directly with residents, we are grounding this work in the voices and lived realities of the people it is meant to serve.”
Kupe, the chief equity officer, said it is impossible to “talk about reparation without centering the lived experiences of Black Chicagoans.”
Repair Chicago is an “opportunity to listen deeply, learn collectively and ensure that community voice is not symbolic, but foundational to the policies and recommendations” that the city ultimately makes to repair the damage done by slavery.
In November 2019, Evanston made history by establishing a
